When Enough = Contentment

Clothes no-buy: 8 month mark

Time to stop and smell the roses admire the tulips.

My shopping habits have changed: shopping is no longer a habit.

I haven’t bought any new clothes since July 29, 2024. I have worn the clothes I have, all of which were chosen lovingly by me at some point before that date. I deleted my Instagram account around the same time, so stopped taking daily outfit pictures. I have just got up every day, dressed in my clothes, and carried on my day LIKE A NORMAL PERSON! Sometimes, I’ve loved my outfit, but there is no visual record of it. Sometimes I’ve got dressed hardly thinking about what I was wearing, and felt great anyway, because I have nice clothes. Sometimes I’ve worn outfits that probably looked dull and uninspired to other people, but which fed my soul.

I still love clothes, I’m still interested in them, I still think about what I’m going to wear at any given time. But the difference is that I feel intense love (and gratitude towards) MY clothes, rather than hypothetical future purchases. I belatedly realise that this is in fact real life. It has taken away the FOMO, also because as I stand back and watch sales cycle through, I know that everything I might want is going to come back into rotation again. The exceptional, one-off pieces, the things I would feel triumphant about having snagged - I already have them, or a version of them. I have smart dressing up pieces that I rarely wear because I’m a tired introvert, but when I’m going somewhere that requires a bit more pizzazz, I’m ready for it.

I don’t feel an aching gap where my shopping habits used to be - life has seamlessly grown over it. I don’t feel apologetic about wearing the same pair of trousers almost every week, because they are comfortable and I like the way they look, and in real life everyone else is doing the same thing.

Honestly, I really thought I was going to agonise a bit, but learn some interesting and inspiring lessons, and have great insights to share, but I don’t. Or rather, I have had hammered home to me the things that I already knew.

I notice people wearing things they have worn before especially if I like the garment. I don’t notice what people are wearing if I am not interested in what they are wearing. I have a colleague who always wears quite tailored clothes, in a neutral, pattern free, palette. She has a long, filmy leapord-print skirt which she wears occasionally. Its not the same type of style as her other work outfits, but her style encompasses a boho skirt in her usual colour palette (it pairs with any of her usual jackets). I like that when I look at her in this skirt, it tells me more about her sense of personal style than if all her clothes fit into a style box. I realise that I get active enjoyment from seeing people’s familiar clothes: someone’s groovy trousers, someone’s lovely jacket, someone else’s marshmallow-coloured tracksuit - the things they love and wear often; the pieces that define someone’s style. There is no comfort in seeing someone who never repeats, or whose clothes are so rigidly conforming to an outside influence that there is no room for character.

Do I think choosing to do a no-buy is for everyone? No, I don’t. I think you need to feel very ready to change your habits, and very sure that you have what you need to get you through however long you plan on doing it, because I don’t think it will be of benefit if you constantly feel that you are lacking something crucial to your comfort (physical and/or emotional).

I’m also aware that there are times in your life when you aren’t able to choose or not choose a no-buy - you simply aren’t in a position to buy more clothes. I’ve been there, and I’m aware that I am in a very privileged position right now.

Also, my age and stage of life very much plays into this. Of course it’s easy for me - I’m 62. I’ve been through all the stages, and had decades to play around with what I want to wear. I’m more interested in my style than trends now, so if the two align then great, and if not, tant pis. I’ve spent years putting together my forever wardrobe, but I couldn’t have done that twenty or thirty years ago because my style was very different, and even my fifty-year old self would have considered what I wear now to be quite dull. My style nods much more towards classic than it used to, and I don’t know if there is much that I could have held on to from my previous wardrobe iterations even if they had been better quality - although having said that, my daughter now has, and wears, a few things of mine or my mother’s that have been around for several decades .

The notion of the no-buy year has overwhelmingly been a positive for me, because it has done exactly what I wanted it to do: stopped me buying more clothes which I don’t need, and let me appreciate what I have. It has given me the time and space to make up my mind that future purchases will be from sources that I believe practice ethical and sustainable manufacturing. I have taken away my excuses for impulse buying or convenience buying: if I don’t need anything, I can choose to take the time to buy what I want. I don’t necessarily think that you should be “investing in the classics” when you are young, unless that is your style, because when you’re young is when you should be experimenting, and trying your various selves on for size.

What I do think you should be doing, even if you don’t hang on to your clothes for ever, is thinking about what happens next to them, and their end of life. If you are buying piles of polyester, wearing them a few times and then selling them on, you’re just passing the problem on to the poor sap at the end who consigns them to landfill. At least if you are buying the best quality you can and the most natural materials, you are doing everything you can to give your garment a long and productive life, giving pleasure to other people!

There are loads of clothes I didn’t wear this winter, because I really stuck to quite a limited wardrobe. This is not the much-touted “you only wear 20% of your wardrobe” thing, because I know I can choose to keep it simple this year (when there is a lot of overwhelm), and go nuts (in my own closet) next winter; my wardrobe allows for a lot of scope. There are a couple of heavy sweaters that didn’t get much wear, because I was on a serious navy kick this winter and they are not navy. They will come in useful other winters, though, especially when I’m not going to work every day. This winter has really brought home to me yet again the understanding that I have more than enough. Knowing I have a closet packed with alternatives helps me not feel bored wearing the same thing over and over because I feel as though I have plenty of choices.

I don’t think I’m going to feel quite so complacent when spring proper kicks in, and I will wish I had more cardigans and jackets, but I will also try to remember that I feel like this every year, and then the inbetween season is over before I have time to figure out exactly what I want, and I just feel prickly and irritated about what to wear to work, but I don’t feel like that at the weekend, when I’m not leaving the house in the early morning and coming home mid-afternoon. This is not a longterm problem, and I think it’s probably not solvable, in any case. Spring and autumn are annoying for me, but I get over it.

I’m not saying that at this age I am never going to buy more clothes or change my style (when I look at my nearly 90-year old mother, I’m happy to acknowledge that there may be space in my life for cashmere tracksuits at some future point) and I don’t want to imply that I have embraced my inner frump and given up, either, because this is not the case. But the past eight months have allowed me to learn to admire without needing to acquire. And to acknowledge that my dressing room functions like a shop stocked with all the kinds of things that I like to wear.

But I realise that I will not be able to shop again without guilt. Knowing you have enough (not just in terms of numbers, but in terms of having clothes you love for any occasion) will make the excuses I will undoubtedly make to myself sound hollow. And I’m OK with that. I think the guilty knowledge that I don’t need something will act as a useful check to my shopping instincts, and I know it won’t mar my enjoyment in whatever it is that I do eventually buy. Because this no-buy is now tied up with my household no-buy, I realise that over the past several years I have bought clothes the way I have acquired (rarely bought) furniture, assuming that we’re in it together for the long-term.

I deleted my favourite online shopping apps - YOOX and The Outnet - from my phone when I started, and yesterday I went back and had a look at my wishlist on both. Neither had anything I had desperately missed, and I hadn’t even remembered anything that was on there. I think my future shopping will be much more driven by identifying proper gaps (suitable top layers for spring and autumn, for instance) than an automatic add to basket when something nice is an affordable price. I’m not berating myself for my previous behaviour, to be clear - I really love the things I did that with, and often it was a good way for me to take a punt on something that didn’t tick any sensible boxes. It’s just that then I needed to recognise when I needed to stop.

I think it will be interesting to see what happens in August, when I can in theory shop for clothes again. I originally started this as a month by month experiment but realised that I kept feeling ridiculous announcing that I hadn’t bought any clothes for an entire month. I can’t help feeling that it was telling that when I stopped buying clothes, no one in my real life batted an eye, because it’s quite normal for people not to buy clothes all the time!

I think that at this point, the household no buy and the clothes one are so entwined, and now so caught up with saving money (which wasn’t an aim when I started) that there’s no chance of me going back to my old ways. The household one is a constant check, because things do run out, or break, and I have to ask myself if I have something else to replace it, or do I even need to replace it? I used to always babysit my granddaughter at her house but now she often comes to mine and I have to balance my urge to fill up the place with fun things for her (that are also pleasing to me) with the fact that she has plenty to keep her going here already.

I’ve said that FOMO is (almost!) a thing of the past, and the other major change in the way I think relates to the scarcity mindset. Both of those together - the fear of missing out and the fear of running out - made for a potent mix, especially when I added in some magical thinking about being sensible (multiples, sale prices, etc). I’m grateful to my previous semi-hoarding instincts because I haven’t had to buy anything other than food or minor cleaning materials - I’ve been able to restock my bathroom shelves, and switch up my decoration using stuff I had stashed away. And while it was my previous habits that have made this possible, it’s aiding my current ones by ensuring that I lose the shopping habit.

I haven’t cut myself off from looking at things on the internet, and I didn’t cancel all my (non-Substack) shopping newsletter subscriptions, but the difference is that now I’m looking partly from an aspirational aspect (some of these things I would someday like to have, and while they aren’t in my non-existent budget right now, they are not forever out of reach) and partly in the way I look at art, or magazines - I look at something and admire it or not, and it helps to develop my taste, and just generally refine my sense of what is beautiful to me and what isn’t.

It’s quiet inside my head. I don’t put something on and think, “That’s nice, I wonder how this skirt would look with this sweater in blue? I wonder if they do it in blue? Oh look, it’s on sale! But not in my size! Oh no, I knew I should have got the blue as well when I got this one…” Or, “What if I got that lamp I’ve been coveting? Where would I put it? What would I have to move?” I look at my clothes and my rooms and think how lovely they are, and because there’s no possibility of major change, I properly settle in to feeling content with my lot.

So my major useful takeaway at 8 months in is this: I’m committed to my current belongings. We’re in it together for the foreseeable. I feel content.